According to Ada, she and Van will have four pairs of eyes in paradise:
Nirvana, Nevada, Vaniada. By the way, should I not add, my Ada, that only at the very last interview with poor dummy-mummy, soon after my premature — I mean, premonitory — nightmare about, ‘You can, Sir,’ she employed mon petit nom, Vanya, Vanyusha — never had before, and it sounded so odd, so tend... (voice trailing off, radiators tinkling).
‘Dummy-mum’ — (laughing). ‘Angels, too, have brooms — to sweep one’s soul clear of horrible images. My black nurse was Swiss-laced with white whimsies.’
Sudden ice hurtling down the rain pipe: brokenhearted stalactite.
Recorded and replayed in their joint memory was their early preoccupation with the strange idea of death. There is one exchange that it would be nice to enact against the green moving backdrop of one of our Ardis sets. The talk about ‘double guarantee’ in eternity. Start just before that.
‘I know there’s a Van in Nirvana. I’ll be with him in the depths moego ada, of my Hades,’ said Ada.
‘True, true’ (bird-effects here, and acquiescing branches, and what you used to call ‘golden gouts’).
‘As lovers and siblings,’ she cried, ‘we have a double chance of being together in eternity, in terrarity. Four pairs of eyes in paradise!’
‘Neat, neat,’ said Van. (5.6)
Ada is Gen. of ad ("hell" in Russian). Inferno ("Hell") is the first part, Paradiso is the third (and last) part of Dante's Divine Comedy. Ada's "four pairs of eyes in paradise" bring to mind "Upon the sight of lidless eyes in Hell," the last line in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's sonnet Inclusiveness:
The changing guests, each in a different mood,
Sit at the roadside table and arise:
And every life among them in likewise
Is a soul's board set daily with new food.
What man has bent o'er his son's sleep, to brood
How that face shall watch his when cold it lies?--
Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes,
Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?
May not this ancient room thou sit'st in dwell
In separate living souls for joy or pain?
Nay, all its corners may be painted plain
Where Heaven shows pictures of some life Spent well;
And may be stamped, a memory all in vain,
Upon the sight of lidless eyes in Hell.
In The House of Life (DGR's sonnet sequence) Inclusiveness is followed by Ardor and Memory:
The cuckoo-throb, the heartbeat of the Spring;
The rosebud's blush that leaves it as it grows
Into the full-eyed fair unblushing rose;
The summer clouds that visit every wing
With fires of sunrise and of sunsetting;
The furtive flickering streams to light re-born
'Mid airs new-fledged and valorous lusts of morn,
While all the daughters of the daybreak sing:--
These ardor loves, and memory: and when flown
All joys, and through dark forest-boughs in flight
The wind swoops onward brandishing the light,
Even yet the rose-tree's verdure left alone
Will flush all ruddy though the rose be gone;
With ditties and with dirges infinite.
The full title of VN's novel is Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. According to Van, memory is a photo-studio de luxe on an infinite Fifth Power Avenue. In Van's and Ada's joint memory recorded and replayed is their early preoccupation with the strange idea of death. In Known in Vain, the next sonnet in The House of Life, Death is the last word:
As two whose love, first foolish, widening scope,
Knows suddenly, with music high and soft,
The Holy of holies; who because they scoff'd
Are now amazed with shame, nor dare to cope
With the whole truth aloud, lest heaven should ope;
Yet, at their meetings, laugh not as they laugh'd
In speech; nor speak, at length; but sitting oft
Together, within hopeless sight of hope
For hours are silent:--So it happeneth
When Work and Will awake too late, to gaze
After their life sailed by, and hold their breath.
Ah! who shall dare to search through what sad maze
Thenceforth their incommunicable ways
Follow the desultory feet of Death?
Sonnets 99 and 100 in DGR's The House of Life are entitled Newborn Death 1 and Newborn Death 2. The last sonnet in The House of Life, Sonnet 101, is entitled The One Hope:
When vain desire at last and vain regret
Go hand in hand to death, and all is vain,
What shall assuage the unforgotten pain
And teach the unforgetful to forget?
Shall Peace be still a sunk stream long unmet,
Or may the soul at once in a green plain
Stoop through the spray of some sweet life-fountain
And cull the dew-drenched flowering amulet?
Ah! when the wan soul in that golden air
Between the scriptured petals softly blown
Peers breathless for the gift of grace unknown,
Ah! let none other alien spell soe'er
But only the one Hope's one name be there,
Not less nor more; but even that word alone.
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate ("All hope abandon ye who enter here") is the admonition inscribed over the entrance to Hell in Dante's Inferno.
In his poem The Lover's Litany Kipling mentions the eyes of four colors (grey, black, brown and blue). Baudelaire's poem Les Litanies de Satan (“Litanies of Satan”) ends in a Prayer:
Prière
Gloire et louange à toi, Satan, dans les hauteurs
Du Ciel, où tu régnas, et dans les profondeurs
De l'Enfer, où, vaincu, tu rêves en silence!
Fais que mon âme un jour, sous l'Arbre de Science,
Près de toi se repose, à l'heure où sur ton front
Comme un Temple nouveau ses rameaux s'épandront!
Prayer
Glory and praise to you, O Satan, in the heights
Of Heaven where you reigned and in the depths
Of Hell where vanquished you dream in silence!
Grant that my soul may someday repose near to you
Under the Tree of Knowledge, when, over your brow,
Its branches will spread like a new Temple!
(tr. W. Aggeler)
A couple of days before the Night of the Burning Barn (when they make love for the first time) Van and Ada climb the Tree of Knowledge that grows at Ardis:
Van, in blue gym suit, having worked his way up to a fork just under his agile playmate (who naturally was better acquainted with the tree’s intricate map) but not being able to see her face, betokened mute communication by taking her ankle between finger and thumb as she would have a closed butterfly. Her bare foot slipped, and the two panting youngsters tangled ignominiously among the branches, in a shower of drupes and leaves, clutching at each other, and the next moment, as they regained a semblance of balance, his expressionless face and cropped head were between her legs and a last fruit fell with a thud — the dropped dot of an inverted exclamation point. She was wearing his wristwatch and a cotton frock.
(‘Remember?’
‘Yes, of course, I remember: you kissed me here, on the inside —’
‘And you started to strangle me with those devilish knees of yours —’
‘I was seeking some sort of support.’)
That might have been true, but according to a later (considerably later!) version they were still in the tree, and still glowing, when Van removed a silk thread of larva web from his lip and remarked that such negligence of attire was a form of hysteria.
‘Well,’ answered Ada, straddling her favorite limb, ‘as we all know by now, Mlle La Rivière de Diamants has nothing against a hysterical little girl’s not wearing pantalets during l’ardeur de la canicule.’
‘I refuse to share the ardor of your little canicule with an apple tree.’
‘It is really the Tree of Knowledge — this specimen was imported last summer wrapped up in brocade from the Eden National Park where Dr Krolik’s son is a ranger and breeder.’
‘Let him range and breed by all means,’ said Van (her natural history had long begun to get on his nerves), ‘but I swear no apple trees grow in Iraq.’
‘Right, but that’s not a true apple tree.’
(‘Right and wrong,’ commented Ada, again much later: ‘We did discuss the matter, but you could not have permitted yourself such vulgar repartees then. At a time when the chastest of chances allowed you to snatch, as they say, a first shy kiss! Oh, for shame. And besides, there was no National Park in Iraq eighty years ago.’ ‘True,’ said Van. ‘And no caterpillars bred on that tree in our orchard.’ ‘True, my lovely and larveless.’ Natural history was past history by that time.) (1.15)
Describing Ada’s eyes, Van mentions a satanic night of black sleet:
The eyes. Ada’s dark brown eyes. What (Ada asks) are eyes anyway? Two holes in the mask of life. What (she asks) would they mean to a creature from another corpuscle or milk bubble whose organ of sight was (say) an internal parasite resembling the written word ‘deified’? What, indeed, would a pair of beautiful (human, lemurian, owlish) eyes mean to anybody if found lying on the seat of a taxi? Yet I have to describe yours. The iris: black brown with amber specks or spokes placed around the serious pupil in a dial arrangement of identical hours. The eyelids: sort of pleaty, v skladochku (rhyming in Russian with the diminutive of her name in the accusative case). Eye shape: languorous. The procuress in Wicklow, on that satanic night of black sleet, at the most tragic and almost fatal point of my life (Van, thank goodness, is ninety now — in Ada’s hand) dwelt with peculiar force on the ‘long eyes’ of her pathetic and adorable grandchild. How I used to seek, with what tenacious anguish, traces and tokens of my unforgettable love in all the brothels of the world! (1.17)
In his poem Polyubuytes' zhe vy, deti ("Look, you children," 1830) Pushkin mentions chernookaya Rosseti (black-eyed Rosseti, the Empress's lady-in-waiting):
Полюбуйтесь же вы, дети,
Как в сердечной простоте
Длинный Фирс играет в эти,
Те, те, те и те, те, те.
Черноокая Россети
В самовластной красоте
Все сердца пленила эти,
Те, те, те и те, те, те.
О, какие же здесь сети
Рок нам стелет в темноте:
Рифмы, деньги, дамы эти,
Те, те, те и те, те, те.
In a letter of about/not later than June 27, 1834, to his wife Pushkin informs Natalie that Mme Smirnov (A. O. Rosset's married name) gave birth to twins and calls Mr Smirnov krasnoglazyi krolik (a red-eyed rabbit):
Смирнова родила благополучно, и вообрази: двоих. Какова бабёнка, и каков красноглазый кролик Смирнов? — Первого ребёнка такого сделали, что не пролез, а теперь принуждены надвое разделить.
The local entomologist, Dr Krolik is Ada's beloved teacher of natural history. The Erminin twins, Greg and Grace (who marries a Wellington), bring to mind Erminia, the nickname of Pushkin's staunch friend Eliza Khitrovo (Kutuzov's daughter).